I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

Every country has the government it deserves.